This
weird movie purports to be the “real” story of the Scopes Trial, unlike the
classic play and movie “Inherit the Wind,” which contains numerous errors. Well let’s start right there. “Inherit the Wind” contains no errors at all,
because it is a work of fiction, a “roman-a-clef”. There is no John Scopes, there is Bertram
Cates; there is no Clarence Darrow, only Henry Drummond, no William Jennings
Brian, only Matthew Harrison Brady; and no H. L. Mencken, only E. K.
Hornbeck. Further, it is about the
McCarthy era, not the Roaring Twenties.
Sure it takes place in the Roaring Twenties, but the play was about the political suppression of ideas, which was the issue in the 1950s, when it
opened.

“Alleged,”
however, self-consciously asserts its verisimilitude, even going so far as to
use the real names of the famous principals, as it butchers the very reality it
claims to imitate. The movie takes place
in a preternaturally clean rural Southern town, free of class prejudice and the
Ku Klux Klan, much less the fire-and-brimstone caterwauling of the age.

The
movie then integrates a eugenics sub-plot to tie evolution to eugenics. Now this is something I am a bit sympathetic
to, since I’ve written about it over the last few years. There’s only two problems with this plot
contrivance. First, eugenics didn’t
actually come up at the trial. And
second, the people the movie demonizes – Darrow and Mencken – are the ones who
actually wrote eloquently against eugenics (shortly after the trial
ended). In Mencken’s literary magazine, The American Mercury, Darrow called the eugenicists “irresponsible fanatics”. In
the Baltimore Sun, Mencken called
eugenics “mainly blather”.

William
Jennings Bryan was very much the pacifist and isolationist, and was ahead of
his day in his views on equality and his views again social Darwinism. But he didn’t write specifically against
eugenics. Darrow and Mencken did.

In fact,
Darrow published his critique of eugenics in H. L. Mencken’s literary magazine,
The American Mercury. When the very first biologist to make a
public critique of eugenics comes forward, it is H. L. Mencken’s friend, the
Johns Hopkins geneticist Raymond Pearl.
And he publishes as well in The
American Mercury, and it is so newsworthy that it gets picked up by the
wire services and makes headlines all across America. Story goes that it even cost Pearl an offer
of a professorship at Harvard. The
point is that, far from being the eugenicist that the film depicts, it is hard
not to see Mencken’s hand all over the mobilization of American opinion against
eugenics.

What
little there is of the famous cross-examination of Bryan by Darrow – the climax of “Inherit the Wind” – is actually condensed into a single minute of this
ridiculous movie. This Bryan (played by
former Senator Fred Thompson) is serene, thoughtful, and implacable for his
minute of cross-examination. The event
actually took place on July 20, 1925, on a Monday after most of the journalists
(including Mencken) had left town. Serene,
thoughtful, implacable. This movie’s
cross-examination gives us no glimpse of whatever inspired The New York Times to include in their next day’s Page One
headline, “Angered, He Shouts That He Is Fighting for God against America’s
Greatest Atheist”.

What’s
even weirder is that this film plays around with the actual court testimony
just as egregiously as “Inherit the Wind” did, except that his film claims not
to be doing so, which means that it is more of a lie than “Inherit the Wind”
could possibly be. For example, when William Jennings Bryan volunteers that he believes that the “days” of
creation may have been indefinitely long periods of time (he wasn’t tricked
into it, as “Inherit the Wind” implies), this movie has Darrow respond “You do
not!”

The
truth is much more interesting. Darrow
was surprised to learn that Bryan accepted the age of the earth, but would
certainly not accuse Bryan of perjuring himself by lying about his beliefs
under oath. But District Attorney Tom
Stewart immediately realized Bryan’s answer was a big problem, and interrupted.

STEWART: I want to interpose another objection. What is the
purpose of this examination?

But he
was too late. Bryan was already orating.

BRYAN: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes
in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these
gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in
the Bible.

But Darrow
hardly ever let an adversary have the last word.

DARROW: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses
from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that
is all.

So Bryan
continued speechifying.

BRYAN: I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the
greatest atheist or agnostic in the United States. I want the papers to know I
am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst. I
want the world to know that agnosticism is trying to force agnosticism on our
colleges and on our schools, and the people of Tennessee will not permit that
to be done.

Cue the
applause. The day ended about a
half-hour-later, and not at all serenely, as this movie suggests. In fact, “Inherit the Wind” captures the
chaos a lot better. Here is how the day
ended, not at all suggested in Senator Fred Thompson’s portrayal.

BRYAN: Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only
purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his
questions. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world.
I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is
trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and, while it require time, I
am willing to take it.

DARROW: I object to your statement. I am examining you on your
fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!

I
thought it was pretty weird also when Darrow reviews human evolution privately
with his scientists and reduces the fossil evidence to Java Man, Nebraska Man,
and “Boxhole Man”. I think the
screenwriters probably meant “Boxgrove”.
You’d think the scientists would have been even passingly familiar with
“Neanderthal Man” and “Piltdown Man” (both of which were indeed known at the
time, although the latter turned out to be unreal, like the Paluxy River footprints that prove humans lived with dinosaurs).

Nebraska
Man is interesting, because it does represent an egregious example of
scientific overreach. By 1927 it was
understood to be a peccary. Isolated,
worn teeth are sometimes not as clearly diagnostic as we might like, but it
certainly wasn’t something solid enough to bludgeon the creationists with, and
often quite snarkily. Historian
Constance Areson Clark discusses this in her very interesting recent book, “God or Gorilla”.

The plot
of “Alleged” is actually a clumsy, vapid romance between a budding newsman and
his budding girlfriend, set against the backdrop of the trial. The newsman has no family except a dead
father, and the girlfriend has a black half-sister, which isn’t at all
scandalous in clean, rural 1925 Tennessee.

The real
problem is the idea that a counter-lie must be put out there to offset a prior
lie, in this case, the filmmakers’
perception of “Inherit the Wind”. This
is, I think, related to the stupid creationist idea that there are exactly two
sides to any story: the scientific and the Biblical. And since it is a zero-sum game, anything bad
for science must ipso facto be good
for the Bible. So making Mencken look
bad must make Jesus look good.

The
biggest lie of all, however, is actually in the credits. After placing the story in the backdrop of “actual”
events and “real” personages, in order to claim a degree of verisimilitude that
they don’t actually deserve, the producers actually show the standard
disclaimer.